Event overview
The new digital elites: neoliberalism, technocrats, and their failures
Since the origins of neoliberal thought in the 1930s, neoliberalism has rested partly on a critique of 'intellectuals' and of social science as a legitimating basis for modern power. In place of experts, neoliberalism proposes a cybernetic system organised around the market: a network of agents interacting via a network of information exchange, with the price system at its core.
Events of 2016 demonstrated the full political implications of the critique of experts, often framed as the rise of 'post-truth'.
However, we are not moving beyond all forms of science or data or rationality. Instead, advanced neoliberalism privileges cyborg calculation - hybrid combinations of human and non-human calculation, combined with extensive sensory devices which collect data ubiquitously without any need for social scientists or experts. This talk will explore this new mode of 'technocracy without technocrats', including the political and economic implications.
Bio:
Will Davies is Reader in Political Economy at Goldsmiths. He is author of The Limits of Neoliberalism: Authority, Sovereignty and the Logic of Competition (Sage, 2016) and The Happiness Industry: How the government and big business sold us wellbeing (Verso, 2015).
Dates & times
Date | Time | Add to calendar |
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23 Jan 2017 | 5:30pm - 7:00pm |
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